360. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
Rating: ☆☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by: Tammis and David Matzinger
Author: John Carreyrou
Genre: Non Fiction, Business, Crime, Science
339 pages, published May 21, 2018
Reading Format: Book
Summary
Bad Blood is written by John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story of massive fraud and deception by Silicon Valley startup Theranos which was at one time valued at 9 billion dollars and whose board of directors included such luminaries as George Schulz, David Bois, David Mattis and Henry Kissinger. Carreyrou tells the fascinating of Stanford drop out Elizabeth Holmes, who fancied herself as a female Steve Jobs, and her quest to revolutionize the lab testing business by making blood tests significantly faster and easier. However, when the technology didn’t work, Theranos started down a path of deception, obfuscation and harassment of anyone bold enough to challenge them.
Quotes
“A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it.”
My Take
I first heard about Theranos when I watched a 60 minutes expose on Elizabeth Holmes. That piqued my interest to read Bad Blood. However, I had to wait for my husband Scot to finish it before I had a turn. After I finished, my mom and stepdad breezed through it in short order. What a fascinating, page turner! An extremely compelling true story with lots of larger than life characters, plot twists and a morality tale. Highly recommended.